


Each result and glory

by Petra



Category: Doctrine of Labyrinths - Sarah Monette
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-03
Updated: 2009-12-03
Packaged: 2017-10-04 03:25:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,587
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25444
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Petra/pseuds/Petra
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mildmay has low expectations of Felix's behavior and Felix exceeds them consistently. Set between The Virtu and The Mirador.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Each result and glory

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to Jamjar and Carla for beta reading and keeping this on track. Written for Yuletide 2008.

** _Mildmay_ **

 

I never expected nothing good to come out of Felix's mouth when he got some fuck-awful bright idea, and Kethe, every time he thought of something he just scared me more.

Figures I should never have followed him, let him cast the binding by forms on me, if I was going to be scared off so easy, but nobody ever said I was all that good at taking care of myself. Nobody who knew me, anyway. You'd never catch Felix even thinking it. But I followed him, and kept on doing it, and where I'd have ended up if I hadn't -- hell if I know.

Hell if it's worth thinking about now when I can't change nothing.

But those times when Felix gets all lit up by some idea Brinvillier Strych would've thought twice before he said it out loud, I kinda wish I had someplace else to go. Even when he looks like he's thinking something that's going to hurt and what he's really thinking is, "We ought to have a special dinner tonight."

He doesn't so much say that kind of stuff to me as to Gideon, but every now and then I get in on the fringes of whatever he's on about today, and fuck if I don't want to run away twice as fast from Felix in a pretty mood as Felix in a hellish one. I can trust Felix in a hellish mood a fucking lot more than I can trust him when he's smiling, even when it looks like maybe he means it. Nobody except him knows what he's after, and that's assuming he's figured it out.

"Why tonight?" I asked him, on account of he wanted somebody to ask him and he was all wide-eyed, looking like he needed everybody in the Mirador talking about him right that damn second or he was going to start pouting. Which, well, Felix. He just might've.

"It's been half a year since --" he waved his hand, giving me that edged smile until I looked away.

And then he just fucking stopped talking. Begging for attention, getting himself all worked up over fuck knows what. "Since what?"

He laughed and all the hair on the back of my neck stood up and told me just how stupid I was for not running right then and there. "It's by way of being our anniversary."

Anniversaries -- like it made a damn bit of difference how many indictions you'd been doing something you couldn't stop doing, when you were going to keep on doing it. Like celebrating what day you were born on, which some people did, but it mostly seemed like a breath-thin excuse to get something from your friends. I didn't say anything, half because I didn't have anything to say and half because I wanted to know what had gotten into Felix's head that made anything like an anniversary sound like it was worth counting up to, let alone having some special dinner.

Felix pressed his lips together and gave me an impatient look, like he wanted me to ask out loud. He could just go on wanting, and after half a year -- or however long it'd been -- he should've known that without thinking, and sure as hell without pouting. But he was never one to turn down a good excuse to sulk. "I believe it's traditional to honor the obligation d'âme with some recognition of its existence on a regular basis."

I shrugged -- all the traditions I knew about the fucking thing were about staying out of it, and making sure nobody ever got it into his head to try it anyway, and why it was a fucking stupid thing to do in the first place even if sometimes it didn't sound so bad, and it didn't actually hurt, and you got used to it, sort of, after a while.

Felix sighed like he was twelve kinds of put-upon and I was the one acting like a toddler over fuck-all. "I suppose I can celebrate it alone if I must."

It would've just made him happier if I'd rolled my eyes, so I didn't. Powers and saints, you'd think Felix was the one following me around -- but that was a long time ago now. Way more than an indiction, and even then I'd been half dragging him some of the time. Funny how things flipped around without ever getting any fucking better. "I gotta eat one way or another," I said, and that got him pursing his lips.

"Of course," he said, his voice all tight. And maybe I wasn't making it easy for him, as much as I might've, but I wasn't never going to make it as easy as Felix wanted. Whatever it was he was aiming for, I'd do it, sure as shit, but I could only half-read him half the time, and not when he got all highfalutin like he was. Like this was the biggest thing he'd wanted in a great septad, and here I was turning him down, except I didn't turn nothing down and he knew just how to get whatever the fuck he wanted from me, no matter what I wanted.

But fuck me, it got old watching him sulk, and even though I'm not any better at giving up than he is, nobody was getting nowhere playing not-talking-about games. So I asked, "When's supper?"

He didn't relax, but he softened a little, enough that I felt like it wasn't so much a game anymore. "Two hours. And we'll be going out."

Fuck me sideways till I cry, like I wanted to parade around the fucking city looking like his cut-up lapdog. Like he needed that attention -- like there was any kind of good attention we could get in Mélusine, the two of us, looking like a skew-eyed hocus and his hobble-legged fuck-up of an esclavin. Ain't nobody enjoys their dinner more for watching me eat, either. But I said, "Okay," cause if I didn't, he'd be going and I'd be going just the same, if he had to drag me along by telling me I didn't have no other choice but to go.

Didn't mean I was looking forward to none of it. Whatever it was Felix was planning, the dinner wasn't going to make it all better in advance.

 

** _Felix_ **

 

I had long since stopped expecting Mildmay to do anything with any sort of grace, but on occasion his obstinacy was still firm enough to astonish me. I intended to give him some recognition that I was aware of how much he had given me over the last half a year, a reward, perhaps, or at minimum a pleasant evening.

When the idea had occurred to me, though, I did not account for his mulish nature, and I did not expect him to resist the idea of a pleasant evening spent outside the walls of the Mirador -- a place I know discomfits him on the deepest level -- as if I had proposed a light evening's drowning. He accepted with an ill humor and dressed with a worse one, clothing himself in plain black and leaning on his cane with such ill-humor that I was more than half inclined to call the whole thing off and dine alone.

I might have done so if I hadn't made such a point of the occasion; it would have been a cruel thing indeed to remind him of his indentured state by forcing him to endure the discomfort of the Mirador alone for an evening.

As it was, I hired a carriage, though the establishment where we were to dine was not terribly far away, and if I had told Mildmay our destination, he would have refused to get in, preferring to drag himself laboriously along the pavement. He made that more than clear when the carriage stopped.

A less irksome man might have asked, "Already?" but Mildmay merely gave me a look of disdain and stood unevenly. He waited while I paid the driver and shook his head when I stepped down, as if I would not notice the gesture.

"I'm rather tired," I said, for if I had made it seem as though I was accommodating him, he would perforce protest and walk home, perhaps starting right then.

Mildmay's sardonic expression told me that he didn't believe me in the slightest, but he didn't argue the point. He waited for me to pass him on the pavement and stumped along behind me with his painfully uneven gait, fulfilling his self-imposed role as dutifully as ever. For my part, I kept my hands in full view of the people passing us on the street, in case they had not been clearly warned to keep away from well-dressed men with flaming red hair. The tattoos were warning enough for anyone.

The only difficulty I was willing to deal with that evening was Mildmay, and I'd resigned myself to his eccentricities as much out of necessity as fondness. He had had to compensate for the things I asked of him to some extent; in the main, I lived as I pleased and refused to let him impede me.

He did not give me everything I wanted of him, but he never refused me what I needed. I was still man enough to refrain from demanding monstrous things. Demanding that he eat a pleasant dinner with me in a well-lit restaurant, surrounded by well-dressed citizens who knew nearly enough about us to whisper our names and gossip out of hearing was nothing. If all of the burdens I wished to lay on Mildmay were so light, I would not have felt the guilt that spurred me to suggest this observance.

Those moments when I looked at him across the table as he studied the patrons, the waiter, and the exits, and saw him not as he was, but rather as an object of desire, shocked out of his normal reticence by the gods only knew what force -- I kept those moments well out of my expression and dimmed them in my interactions with him. He would not have welcomed them, though he was no fool and surely he suspected some of the foul things I dreamed.

"The soup is too salty," I remarked to him when neither of us had spoken for too long.

He shrugged and let his hair fall into his face, further obscuring whatever emotions he felt. "Better'n a lot of kids have."

If he spoke to enrage me, the words were well-aimed. I knew as well as he did what misery and poverty haunted the streets of Mélusine, but unlike him, I did not find it useful to dwell on past ills if I could possibly avoid it. "At these prices, it ought to be better than Lord Stephen's supper, and I assure you, it is not."

"Maybe we should've stayed up there, then," Mildmay said, glancing toward the Mirador with his unerring sense of direction. "Got what you deserve."

The undercurrents in his tone as he delivered this made me laugh, though he wasn't smiling in the least. "I hope that the latter is unlikely under the best of circumstances."

"Leastways, we could've had Gideon along."

Taking a former member of the Bastion out in any form of society in Marathat, polite or otherwise, invited the sort of disaster to which both of us were far too prone even without the assistance of curious and unfriendly passersby. He'd approved of my plan to, as he put it, "Do something nice for Mildmay for once," enough that he had kissed me farewell without a qualm he allowed me to hear. "Perhaps when it's been a year," I allowed.

The suggestion did not make Mildmay smile -- it took far more than a slight concession to evoke that -- but he nodded and the everpresent slump of his shoulders shifted to a less confrontational angle. "Guess we'll have to work out something, but --" he prodded the soup with his spoon "-- best not to come here again if you're just going to call their soup slops."

It felt good to laugh honestly at a joke he had made, rather than the sort of humor I felt constrained to display at fine wordplay in the Mirador or the bitterer amusement I sometimes felt regarding other matters. "I didn't say it loudly enough to offend the chef."

"Didn't you?" Mildmay's expression of skepticism could put anyone else's to shame. If he had ever had the will to take to Mehitabel's profession, he could have played scenes of great disbelief to the poorest man in the Gods.

It only made me laugh the harder. "I didn't mean to, at least."

"Don't matter so much what you meant to do so much as that that guy looks like you stuffed a lemon in his mouth." He flicked his gaze toward the corner of the room behind me.

I knew better than to turn and look. "No great loss."

"Ain't such a good idea to stay and eat his cookery now, though." Mildmay pushed his chair back from the table.

"Oh, please. No one would dare poison either of us so visibly." I spread my right hand on the tablecloth, as if Mildmay needed reminding of my status.

"Won't slow him down none from spitting in your food." Mildmay looked over my shoulder again, making the movement casual enough that it was unlikely anyone else noticed. He rarely scrupled to use the skills he'd learned as a kept-thief. "'less you want to talk it over with him, let's get outta here."

I frowned. "It doesn't do to simply throw coin on the table. This is not the Arcane."

 

** _Mildmay_ **

 

Fucked if I'd ever get used to hearing Felix talk about the Lower City like it was farther away from the Mirador than Troia. Like he'd forgotten everything he knew about it, instead of just pretending he'd never learned.

Figure I'd get used to it as soon as I got used to Felix treating me like somebody who couldn't tell his ass from a cloud, even though I was pretty sure he knew I wasn't that bad off. "Do what you want," I said, and shrugged at him.

"I always do." He smiled back at me, the smile he used to seduce flashies into agreeing with him. The one that made Gideon grit his teeth if Felix used it on anybody else.

Didn't work on me -- or that's what I was damn happy to tell myself, being as how I'm not molly -- and didn't make me hate him correcting me any less. I had some more soup, which wasn't half as bad as Felix was making it out to be. He might've just been trying to scare the kitchen, tell them they wouldn't get no more hocus business unless they straightened up a little.

It sure made the next course come fast, and it looked damned pretty, too, like the parts of a cow where you didn't have to wonder what it was before, and you didn't have to know neither, all glazed with Kethe knows what and with leafy things around it so's you'd remember what the cow used to eat before it turned into dinner. Felix raised an eyebrow at his portion, then cut into it and toned down the asshole some. "Better," he conceded, and the waiter looked like Felix had just jumped out of the chair screaming for joy.

Better's hard to say comparing stuff that's not the same -- like if you're trying to say whether some annemer is better than a hocus, you got to know what you're asking them to do -- but it tasted like a cow that'd been damn happy and hadn't minded dying too much. The good stuff, treated right. I nodded and ate. Not like the Mirador scanted anybody, not with the kind of money they had to throw around, but it was a treat to eat in a place with windows that let onto real live air with wind, and still have it taste good.

Felix gave me this look that meant he was expecting some damn thing from me. "It's fine," I said. "Guess the tattoos count for more than your manners."

Felix didn't laugh, but he smiled in that self-satisfied way that made hocuses and Teverii want to wipe the floor with his face. "That does seem to be the case."

I shook my head and ate some more. When dessert showed up, it was one of them frilly things that ladies said, "Oh, what a shame, it's too pretty to eat" before they ate it. I didn't have fine airs to put on, and wouldn't've if I did, so I had some, and a little more, till I was damn glad the hardest thing I'd have to do that night was follow Felix home. I said, "This ain't so bad." It was one of the nicest things I'd tasted in indictions.

He said, "No, it isn't bad at all," without correcting me first, half-distracted by the food or Kethe knows what. Close as we usually got to an apology, but I wasn't letting myself relax. I still didn't know what the hell Felix wanted.

When the dessert was all gone and Felix had actually paid for the whole thing -- I didn't look, didn't want to think about how many gorgons he'd blown on a dinner, however nice it was, more or less for me -- he looked at me over the bottle of wine the restaurant owner had bought that neither of us was going to touch, not this far from the Mirador. "Did you like it?" he asked, and his voice was gentle enough that I figured he actually meant it.

"Yeah." It should've been pretty obvious from the way I kept on eating -- I didn't eat that much in a normal week, felt like, and never in one sitting -- but he relaxed when I said it, like he'd thought I'd play along to humor him and then not have the sense to lie about it.

He smiled, too, one of the smiles he kept for special occasions, when he wasn't looking to score off anybody. "Good."

I glanced around at the waiter who was looking nervous at having a hocus still there, not drinking any wine, and everybody else, who wanted to know why Felix Harrowgate was slumming it just on general principles. "Thanks," I said, keeping my voice soft.

It got another crinkle worth of smile out of him. He didn't smile like that, and I didn't thank him for stuff, but hell, he didn't go out of his way like this much for anybody, even Gideon. "I expect I'll make up for it soon, one way or another." He put on a more brittle expression and got up. He was smooth about it, like always, and I wasn't following half so well as I should've, but I got to my feet, anyway.

"Don't matter."

"It doesn't matter," he said, and added, "I know."

'course, if I'd known what-all he was paying me off for in advance, I would've said, "Take your fucking dinner and shove it up your ass."

Would you, Milly-Fox? Nah, I wouldn't've, because he would've laughed at me and said something, Kethe knows what, to make me blush. Him and Keeper and Tabby are the only people who even come close to getting under my skin, but damn it, he's good at it. So I wouldn't've thrown his soup at him, but I should've.

He woke me up at the first hour of the day next morning, when he's almost never even beginning to be awake, let alone up and dressed and looking as bright-eyed as if he was going out of his fucking mind again without that vulnerability. "I need you," he said, and handed me the plain black clothes I always wore.

A thousand ways he could've meant that, and none of them anything you want to hear about before breakfast, but at least he wanted me dressed. That took out a lot of the ways people'd been whispering about us, and made me a lot more willing to go with him. I would've gone anyway, seeing as how I had about as much choice in whether or not I was going with him as his feet did, if he put his mind to wanting me there, but it helped that I didn't mind so much. Felix looked away while I got dressed and bounced on his toes. "Aren't you the slightest bit curious about why I've rousted you out of bed so early?"

He knew as well as I did that you learned early not to ask that kind of questions, that no Keeper worth a damn would ever put up with a kid who asked a lot of dumb questions, but Felix wanted to put on a show for his life, even for me. "Some kind of spell," I said, because I wasn't going to ask. His damned dinner and the early fucking morning together made me glad I hadn't bothered relaxing.

He sighed, probably because I wasn't playing right. "Fine, I won't tell you."

Most of the time if he needed me, it wasn't at dawn. Might be because he needed an annemer, because something in the obligation d'âme meant he needed me, or because he was going to have his hands full and somebody had to turn pages for him while he went through whatever the words were to some spell. But this was before court, when most of the Mirador was safe asleep in their beds and nobody was going to come watch us, Felix striding through the halls with his witchlights leading and me stumping after him. Wasn't no different than the night before, except then we'd had all the Lower City goggling at his tattoos and my hair, and now all the maids and valets with any luck were still asleep.

We ended up in Felix's workroom, one of those places deep in the Mirador that nobody who wasn't supposed to be there could find without a map, and powers and saints, there ain't any maps with that sort of stuff marked. "Stand here," Felix said, and pointed at a spot on the floor that looked just like every other spot on the floor to me.

"You gonna tell me what all this is about?" I asked, even though that was playing his game. He wanted me to ask all the way there, same as he wanted me to wake up, and I'm no good at not doing what Felix wants if he wants it bad enough for long enough.

"Why, so you can call it all 'hocus-stuff' and tell me you don't understand it?" Felix picked up a piece of chalk and started drawing, starting with a little circle around my feet and going on with some kind of writing, fucked if I know what.

I shrugged. He was right about how much I knew about magic, and I wasn't in no hurry to learn any more. It didn't matter what he said, chances were I was going to understand about as much as any dumb kid off the street. Less, depending on where you grabbed the kid, and never mind that I'd been following Felix around for an indiction. He never tried explaining things in words I could maybe get a handle on unless I asked, and with him in this mood and me three-quarters asleep, it wasn't no time to ask for a lesson. Sometimes -- especially on Jeudy -- when he was working up something big, he'd take the time, but this wasn't no time to bug him.

Felix sniffed and kept drawing. "All you need to do is stand there and keep breathing."

Which shouldn't have sounded as scary as it did. His magic never hurt me a lot, and not for long. It sure hurt less than the shit Keeper got me into a great septad times. But if he was going to tell me to keep breathing, that meant maybe he thought not breathing was likely, and I didn't like that. "For how long?"

"Until I tell you I'm done." He called up more of his green witchlights and sent them right over the floor, then added some more letters or whatever they were. Then he frowned at me. "Until then, be quiet."

I nodded and shifted my weight. My bad leg was hurting from the cold of the morning and the walk, and trying to find my balance was none too easy, but I wasn't about to trip out of the circle. Specially not when Felix half-closed his eyes and started concentrating on Kethe knows what.

I don't feel magic like he does -- comes with being annemer -- but I sure as hell knew he was up to something or other, and not just from the runes and the dragging me out of bed at the crack of dawn. The air got heavy, and he said something under his breath. A lot of somethings, and the air kept pressing down like we were underwater until I could feel it all over. Which is stupid, but magic's weird. It got harder to breathe, but I still could, and I only had a couple instructions, so I kept on breathing, trying to ignore the pain running up my leg. I wasn't doing nothing but standing, so I didn't know what the hell its problem was.

After a while -- not an hour, but Kethe, it felt that way -- Felix said another sentence or two and put his hands on my shoulders.

His hands felt like they weighed a thousand times more than normal, and I could feel his rings like they were all on fire. The worst part was the rush of energy that came right after the burning. It went through me from my shoulders to my toes like Felix was a lightning bolt and I was a tree.

I didn't fall over because he'd said not to and because he was holding me up, but it was a near thing anyway. I was sweating like I had a fever, and I was hard like a kid in his third septad looking at a naked girl, and for what? Felix was staring at me -- through me -- his crazy eyes were looking at something behind my head and he was saying something, fuck knows what.

I thought, this is what you get, Milly-Fox, for taking up with a crazy hocus, and then I closed my eyes. Hell if I was going to stare back at his empty expression.

 

** _Felix_ **

 

The power shifted just as I had expected it to, and Mildmay proved an excellent conduit. I could not have forced the shift on my own; the pattern of the spell was such that it required a living target. If it were sane to work spells out of doors in Mélusine, I could have used a tree, but Mildmay was much simpler and more available.

When I could focus on him again, he had his eyes closed and his hands clenched. His face was flushed and his breathing came quickly, more than I had heard from him unless he was in excruciating pain.

I was hard-pressed not to kiss him. I had no rationale for it, should he ask, no excuse but that it was part of the spell -- which would have been a bald-faced lie. The spell was over, the influences shifted where I needed them to continue, and I needed to return to my chambers to change for court.

It was not so pressing, though, that I could not take a moment to admire Mildmay in as unguarded a state as I had seen him in months. His normally pale face looked somewhat hectic with the pink in his cheeks -- a color brought on by my magic. I was ludicrously jealous of that flush; it seemed that such impersonal methods were the only ones by which I could bring him to any response.

The thought of Mildmay's response was enough to draw my eyes lower. The proof of how viscerally he had been affected by the spell was more embarrassing than gratifying, in part because I was certain he would have found it so. I had promised myself and him that I would not take advantage of the obligation d'âme in any of the infamous ways that its practitioners had before me.

Surely it was enough to force Mildmay to kill for me without asking him to pretend a pleasure he did not feel.

I let him go, then caught him by the shoulders again when he swayed toward me. "It's over," I said.

Mildmay let out a shaky breath and opened his eyes. "Good."

I cleared my throat and brushed the chalk that made up the circle where he stood with my foot until the circle was opened. There was no ritual finesse in the gesture, but I was afraid that if I let him go again, he would fall. "Court will start soon."

Mildmay nodded and shifted his weight from one leg to another. He looked as though he was standing more easily, if no more comfortably. "When you're ready."

I let him go, keeping my hands where I could catch him if needed for the first moment, and he seemed as steady as he ever did. "I'll clean this up later." I opened the door and waited while he left, then warded it behind us.

I kept my stride shortened on the way back. For once, Mildmay did not trouble to pretend that he could keep up with me if I went at my normal speed in order to make me go faster. Offering him a silent compromise was the only apology I cared to make for the shock to his system, let alone for looking at him without his knowledge.

He had chosen to follow me in the first place, in full understanding of what he asked and precisely how likely I was to take advantage of what he offered. I wasn't so terrible as to congratulate myself for every day I was ethical enough to deny myself what I wanted.

There were some days, however, when I would have liked to tell someone just how terrible my thoughts had become so that they could be proud of me for refusing to give in to them. Mildmay's open expression, his face calm and pink everywhere but the scar -- there was no one who could have listened to me say half of that without disgust, even Gideon. I put the thought away against darker days and greater temptations, in case I needed it to remind me that I was stronger than I thought.

 

** _Mildmay_ **

 

I was pretty much used to Felix being Felix by the time we got back to Marathat, but fucked if I'm ever going to like the way he is when he doesn't give a shit about anybody else. During that whole dinner -- wining and dining me like some pretty flashie -- I didn't let myself think that he'd changed, and it's a damn good thing, or I'd have been disappointed as fuck.

Wasn't every day his magic did shit to me, let alone leaving me feeling wild for sex, but I wasn't going to say that to him.

Felix-being-Felix probably would've laughed at me, but it was the kind of probably you don't count on. Probably all the times people sang the Lai of Mad Elinor to fuck with him for maybe fucking me didn't get under his skin, neither, but I didn't want to know that. Didn't want to know any more than I already knew, which was that Gideon wasn't enough for him, and whatever the hell else he wanted, it might still include me.

Which meant, even as batfuck nuts as things could get between us, there was always somewhere worse they could get. It's not the kind of comforting thought most of the hocuses in the Mirador told themselves when things got rough, but it was the only kind of comforting thought I was going to get, and Kethe, I knew better than to make him talk to me about it. We were about as good at talking about that kind of shit without arguing as Felix was at swimming in the Sim, and I figured he'd get just as panicked.

But he didn't mention what'd happened to me, which, hell, I wasn't about to complain about small mercies. Not going to say he didn't notice -- I figure you spend more than five minutes in Pharaohlight, you notice that kind of stuff for the rest of forever -- but if he was going to let me pretend nothing special had happened, I was damn happy to let him.

Court was just as boring as any other day. Nobody in that room of flashies and hocuses gave a shit that I was going slow, and if anybody noticed Felix looking bitchier than normal, maybe they stayed the fuck out of his way. Morning after our fucked up anniversary, and normal meant Felix maybe started out slow, but he looked at me a couple times on the way into court. By the time we got there, he looked plenty annoyed and he was walking too fast for me, my damn crippled leg hurt, and we hadn't said a word since the workroom.

You got yourself into this, Milly-Fox. Just keep following him. Nothing else to do.


End file.
